Fiction Podcast: George Saunders Reads Grace Paley and Barry Hannah

On this month’s fiction podcast, George Saunders reads two short stories from the New Yorker archive: “Love,” by Grace Paley, from 1979, and “The Wretched Seventies,” by Barry Hannah, from 1996. Both are short short stories—each occupied only a single page in the magazine. But although they “seem so casual, and almost just dashed off,” Saunders says, “they’re doing really interesting structural and formal things.” In Paley’s story, a woman presents her husband with a love poem she has written, and he begins to reminisce about his former lovers. Yet, somehow, according to Saunders, the story ends up being “a representation of functionality, an actual working marriage, and the pleasures therein.” In Hannah’s story, a recovering drunk muses about his transformation and tentatively reëngages with neighborhood life. Both pieces, Saunders says, “do everything that a ten-thousand-word story would do, but just do it faster.”

You can hear Saunders’s reading of the stories, and his discussion with _The New Yorker’_s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, by listening above or by downloading the podcast for free on iTunes.

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